


Belonging

by mirroredsakura



Series: Armed Escort [3]
Category: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VII
Genre: Alternate Universe, Explicit Sexual Content, F/F, F/M, M/M, Mercenaries, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-29
Updated: 2017-05-06
Packaged: 2018-04-24 01:04:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 15,112
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4899574
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mirroredsakura/pseuds/mirroredsakura
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mercverse AU. So maybe getting caught by the cops wasn't the best course of action for either Zack or Aeris. It's on Cloud and Sephiroth now to get the two of them out of jail - and that might be a little more trouble than what they'd expected.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Unlikely Allies

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Magnet](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/147454) by mirroredsakura. 



> Part of my little corner of the Mercverse AU first dreamed up by icedark_elf. Mercenaries everywhere.

“...And that’s why you need me to come all the way down to the Sector 3 station to bail you and your new girlfriend out.”

Zack’s voice was tinny over the line, but at least he had the decency to sound incredibly sheepish. “Listen, I know it sounds awful and that I should very ashamed of myself and need to see a doctor and a sterilization chamber before getting within ten feet of anybody once I get home but, Cloud, you gotta  _understand--_ ”

“How is there a ‘but’ in this?”

“--the charges are completely unreasonable, I wasn’t trying to _hurt_ her or anything, and we resolved it. Peacefully! We just scared some people outside, they thought I was trying to kill her and wear her as a hat or something. I’ve tried talking to them, and so has she - which, by the way, is by far the more amazing part, that they could say no to that--"

"Don't be disgusting, Zack."

"Not even remotely the direction I was going for. I promise you, you'll see. And--” there was a short pause over the line, and then his words came hushed and a little hurried, “--hey, Cloud, I don’t know what is up with these guys today… they are antsier than I’ve ever seen ‘em, and you know how much experience I got in that department. Has Seph done anything particularly explosive lately?"

"No. Whatever this is, it's about you. Or her. Who  _is_ she?"

"She's... her name's Aeris."

That brought Cloud to a full stop - not just because he knew that name (who in their circles didn't?) but because he heard the sudden tenderness in Zack's voice, a deep-seated content that went beyond good sex.

"Why in your right mind would you ever tangle with the Turks' girl?"

"She's not theirs, Cloud. She doesn't wanna be."

_\--She’s **mine** \--_

_Yep, there it is,_ Cloud thought with a resigned, internal sigh. He knew that demonic note of single-minded Zack protectiveness… perhaps better than anyone. Wasn’t that how Zack had brought  _him_ back from the edge?

There was no creature alive that could match Zack for sheer, loving, dogged persistence.

“You’ll understand when you get here - she’s the Promised Land, man.” There was another abrupt pause, and then in a voice that sounded young, even for Zack: “--You’ll come for us, won’t you, Cloud?”

Cloud was almost offended he even had to  _ask_ . “Zack…”

“Listen, I’m running out of time and I - h-hey! Aeris, babe, yes I’d love to have you talk to him too, I don’t think my winning personality is enough to - what? What do you mean my time’s up? Aww, c’mon man, just hold - Cloud? Hey, Cloud? Oh, Odin-rutting Sleipnir, Cloud just  _come--_ ”

The blond closed his eyes with a sigh as the phone disconnected, and let it drop to the plush pile of the rug. For just a moment longer, he let his muscles relax and he melted back against the comfortable warmth of their resident mage’s bare chest.

He was going. He was  _going_ . Just... It had been such a long mission...

The faint clink of rings accompanied the cool touch of long, aristocratic fingers as Sephiroth reached around to massage his temples.

“I take it Zack has gotten himself in trouble again?” Sephiroth’s voice was deceptively mild, as feigned as Cloud’s indifference. “What has he done this time?”

“He’s gone and gotten himself arrested for having sex in a public bathroom.”

“...Even for Zack, that is unusual.”

“And with that Gainsborough girl…” Cloud sighed again. “Godsall take him, what was he thinking?”

“Is she dangerous?”

“Nobody knows. The Turks want her  _bad_ … but they’re not willing to set a bounty or delegate the hunt to get her. It’s a strange one.”

There was a thoughtful silence as Sephiroth digested this. “Perhaps not so strange. She might have a friend.”

“In the Turks?”

“Indeed.”

“--That’s a dangerous game.”

“You have played worse odds before, Cloud.”

Cloud laughed, although it wasn’t exactly a happy one. “You were worth them, Sephiroth. You’re worth… everything.”

Sephiroth leaned forward and wordlessly kissed him for that. Fine gold chains hung in draping strands from the pins in his hair and they skimmed Cloud’s skin, so light they felt more like lace than metal.

Cloud submitted with a soft sound, lifting a hand cup the sharp lines of that jaw and feel the heavy silk of Sephiroth’s hair sliding through his fingers.

His eyes were heavy-lidded and lambent when Sephiroth pulled away, a sight which provoked a quiet chuckle. “Now isn’t the time for distractions, Cloud.”

“Do you expect trouble?”

“It sounds like a petty violation… but the police were nervous, weren’t they?”

Cloud frowned, eyes sharpening. The faint crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes deepened as his voice turned coldly thoughtful. “They were. And she was there with him, at the end.”

“Don’t the police usually separate the parties in these situations?”

Cloud was already on his feet and strapping on his holsters, striding to the desk safe before he was even finished. “In Midgar they do.”

“He’s kept her with him. The Turks?”

“He didn’t say," Cloud replied, sweeping a wealth of gold 1000-gil coins into a satchel as casually as if they were singles while he continued hunting for their papers. "He would have mentioned them. I'd better get there first."

"We," Sephiroth corrected, rising to his feet and reaching for the long leather coat he usually wore belted into the city’s underbelly.

No one yet had been desperate enough to try and pickpocket a mage, even one decked in as much materia as Sephiroth, but it was not meet to flaunt what he didn't have to, particularly in the slums.

A faint glow bathed Sephiroth's hands as he ran through the greens in his bracers, cautious as ever. "And you're certain he said nothing else?"

"I don't... he asked about you, whether you'd done anything... explosive..." Cloud's eyes went wide and he grabbed his keys, "The Promised Land. He said ‘she's the Promised Land.’"

Sephiroth froze. Cloud saw the fine tremor in the mage’s hands and stole a second to grasp one of them in his. “Keep it together, Seph.”

“The Promised Land,” Sephiroth repeated, and his voice was flat with the echo of old failures.

“ _Seph_ .”

Sephiroth dragged his eyes away from his hands, flicking them up to Cloud’s… and for the first time in a long time, Cloud shivered at the dangerous flicker of madness that still swirled in their very depths.

Jenova’s legacy. One day, her hunger for power might well consume him.

_That day is not today,_ he thought firmly, holding on hard to this man who could have been a god. One crisis at a time. There was a still, breathless silence where Cloud’s hand bore down on Sephiroth’s, and Sephiroth stood as still as stone.

Then, with a calm Cloud knew was mostly a lie, Sephiroth pulled his hand away. “One thing at a time,” he said, his wry smile a shadow of its usual self, “first we save our own. Then we see if we’ve called a war upon ourselves.”

“She liked Zack well enough,” Cloud pointed out, hiding his relief by tossing Sephiroth his own set of motorcycle keys, and starting for the door, “if she’s got any strain strong enough to fight you, she’d have sensed his demon.”

“May she find me even half so lovable.”

“Godsall willing. I would hate to question her taste now.”

xx

A shadow was already waiting for them when the two bikes roared to a stop next to the shabby police station in Sector 3. Constantly under construction, haphazard residential areas cropped up willy-nilly wherever there was enough space, crowding several important-looking Shinra-owned industrial factories like a squabble of baby chicks around a set of squat, square hens - the only reason why this sector had its own police force to begin with.

As Cloud yanked the helmet off the wild mess of his hair, he caught the bright flashing reflection of an electro-mag rod loose and swinging idly in someone’s hand - and he recognized the lanky redhead leaning in the shade of the building, even under the ratty trucker hat and grease-stained overalls.

Reno’s eyes were lazy, but they saw everything and he never let up making you guess what he was really thinking.

“Yo,” he said by way of greeting when Cloud veered away from the straight path to speak to him first. “Knew you’d show up for your boy sooner or later.”

“You here on official business?” Cloud asked warily. It was never easy to know where they stood with the Turks. Some days were better than others.

“Not yet. Boss wanted me to talk to you specifically before anything too big went  _boom_ .”

“Do you think it will come to that?” Sephiroth generally had very little patience when it came to talking with Reno, but he was a professional first, and any threat was still a threat.

Reno held up both hands, “Not if I can help it, man. We got more’n our fair share of trouble up top right now - royals sticking their heads in all sorts of business we’d really rather they didn’t.”

“You’re helping us.” Cloud’s voice was flat and utterly disbelieving. It was the only way to play the game sometimes.

“I’m telling you you’re playing on easy, yo. We’re taking it slow for you - letting you get first dibs.”

Sephiroth raised an eyebrow. “The girl… you want her to get away.”

Reno’s grin widened. “Off the record? She’s damn cute but she ain’t a Turk. And if you ask me, I don’t think the boss likes the idea of Shinra getting his hands on her.”

Cloud was still doubtful. “He’d rather she fall in with a bunch of low-life mercs? The  _competition_ , even?”

The redhead shrugged, “Wasn’t the plan. She was supposed to get outta the city, nobody the wiser. We never figured on her getting  _arrested_ , she’s way too good at that, y’know? Guess she stayed to stick it out with your boy in there.”

His eyes glittered with good humor, and an interest that went beyond professional curiosity. “He must be one hell of a lay.”

Neither Cloud nor Sephiroth rose to respond that, though Cloud for one almost felt like he ought to. “What is she?” he asked instead.

“Powerful,” Reno replied frankly, his voice lower and more serious than was his usual wont. “More than Shinra knows what to do with at any rate. You ask me, I think he’s got half a mind to make her an empress.”

“Same old Shinra,” Cloud muttered, “still trying to rule the world.”

Reno shrugged. “Them’s the breaks, yo.”

“So where do we come in?”

“Simple. You want her, you take her. She's a city girl, got folk around here. If it’s  _you_ , we figure ol’ Shinra will let it lie. You don't, and I've got one hell of a bounty locked in and ready to hand over to you if you help me play this one for the crowd. We bloody a few noses, don't lose any major body parts-- our girl gets away. No harm, no foul.”

"All this for a half-breed?" Sephiroth's voice was always emptiest when he was probing. "This can't be the Professor's sentimentality I see trickling down the ranks."

Reno’s expression never changed, but the light in his eyes grew just a touch unfriendlier. "Hey, I know this is how the game's played, and I don't hold it against you for playing it,  _seidhrmadhr_ . But Fair’s in there running out of thrilling war tales to stall the uniforms with, and there’s only so much help I got for him.”

In another age, Sephiroth might well have blasted Reno into a pillar of ash for using such an old word for a mage - one that intimated the rankest sort of effeminacy. Even now, the dangling chains in his hair shivered in the air as Sephiroth's eyes burned with words unsaid.

But that Sephiroth was not this one, not any longer, and the fires that lit the recesses of his gems soon died. His face took on the deep, long-suffering look - a mix of grudging acknowledgment and the driest sort of humor - it had once worn in long ago days when Zack had been a SOLDIER and Sephiroth had been his General. "You enjoy being trying, don't you?"

Reno's face gave nothing away, "Always seemed to work for Fair. A guy can dream."

Cloud thought it best to step in at this point - it was one thing for his pack to start picking up strays, quite another for his second to keep up a flirtation with a Turk.

\--Not that he was  _jealous_ , exactly, but Reno was so… loud.

"I want to speak to Zack first. All bets are off until then."

The redhead spread his hands carelessly, "Take him. But let him know the fancy footwork I been doing for him on the outside, won't you Cloud? I bet you two rounds of drinks he's not letting her go."

He cocked his head, and Cloud never knew whether or not that disingenuous face meant what it said when Reno mused thoughtfully, “Hey, think she could convince  _him_ he'd make a great Turk?”

Cloud’s hair nearly stood up on end as he bristled at the thought - and even as he did it, he recognized just how _easy_ it was for Reno to get a rise out of them.

Sephiroth caught his eye - a long, wordless look that had a rueful smile down near its depths. A mage with the power to level cities, an immortal older than dirt - and it was still the humans that would forever catch them wrong-footed.

There were reasons their pack still ran so well with the Turks after so many years, even under the shadow of Shinra. Reno was just the biggest one, and the bastard knew it.

“Keep yourself out of trouble for a bit,” Cloud warned Reno as Sephiroth peeled away from them to head inside first. “And hold off on collecting that bet. If this goes like you think it will, it won’t do your cause much good to be caught out with us any time soon. You’re a pain in my ass, Reno, but I’d hate to see your whole squad disappeared.”

The redhead handed him a leather folder and obligingly melted further back into the lengthening shadows. Even then, he couldn’t resist the last word - eyes glittering green as a snake’s, he burlesqued a pouty kiss at Cloud and made a cheeky smacking sound, “Love you too, yo.”

That seemed as good a confirmation as Cloud was going to get.

He wasn’t worried - there was a hard-edged competence in Reno that was impossible to completely dissemble... and besides, before anything else, the Turks took care of their own.

Time for his pack to do the same.

xx

The station chief was a tall, stout man with the largest set of salt-and-pepper muttonchops Cloud had ever seen. He had a stolid, settled look around him that gave you the sense that he had the situation well in hand, thank you very much, even if he wasn’t likely to win a 100-meter dash.

Sephiroth still towered over him, his profile a sketch in clean lines. Cloud never could look at the man without a sharp twinge in his chest - the closest feeling he had ever had in an age or more to a schoolboy’s fascination.

Behind the massive fans of his bangs, two wings of hair were pulled back and doubled over into a tight bun at the crown, anchored by two short yet exquisitely jeweled Wutain-style pins slotted with materia. The rest of his hair was a loose silver coil down his back, undisturbed by the dank heat, the helmet, or the pell-mell ride through streets of lower Midgar.

Cloud didn’t think it was Sephiroth’s  _hair_ necessarily that seemed to unsettle the officer so, lovely and strange though it was… but in spite of the mage’s calm, reasonable cadences, Cloud could see the unease growing behind the stranger’s eyes.

“Is there a problem?”

Sephiroth’s face evidenced not a whit of frustration, but the one look was enough.

Cloud held out a leather folio with a number of papers, “Zack Fair is one of mine, licenced and legal for hire in Midgar. I understand there was a misunderstanding with a girl. Has she pressed charges?”

The man, Officer L. M. Allens according to his nameplate, took a long look at the both of them, and shook his head with a sigh, motioning them into his office.

“Listen," he said when he'd ushered them in and shut the door firmly behind, *it’s not an issue with your papers. Your guy had a set on him too--” he held up a large clear baggie with a set of horribly creased and crumpled pieces of paper, one of which had a dark splotch in the corner that looked suspiciously like coffee, “--and she’s registered as a freelancer herself, licenced to carry. They've been very polite - more than the usual run of you folk that come in here regular. I'd normally have no problem posting bail, but..."

The next thing he pulled out was a heavy vellum, and there was a seal at the bottom Cloud's eyes marked as real gold just from a glance. His lips thinned - anybody on the Planet knew Shinra's distinctive diamond.

“We got this sent out to us this morning, hand-delivered by Shinra blues to all the different stations. The checkpoints go up tonight.”

When Sephiroth took it, he handled it like a viper. "This is a problem for Zack as well?"

"No. You need your guy, you take him. I made a point to tell him that myself, but he just shook his fool head and said you guys were coming and wouldn't leave them in the lurch."

"How thoughtful of him. So the only real legal problem is the girl."

“Afraid so. And I’m sorry it’s got to go this way, I really am. She seems like a real nice girl.”

Cloud was silent through their exchange, his brow furrowed and his attention on the contents of the folder Reno had handed him. There were a number of papers inside, some ident cards, various paid fares, all obviously intended for Aeris and her getaway if that was what it'd come to.

There was a set of forms dated four days prior and signed by the several members of Auxiliary Enforcement - one of the Shinra-led organizations in charge of tracking the dozens of mercenary companies - registering Aeris Gainsborough as a full member of Strife Delivery Service, and a temporary licence for the same. The spaces for Cloud’s own signature and Aeris’s were still noticeably blank.

...There was also a ribbon. A thick, shiny piece of pearly light pink silk that spooled out from between his fingers before he knew it. There were wrinkles of habitual knotting evident in several sections of it, and a faint perfume that smelt briefly of flowers and clean sheets.

Was this… hers?

Cloud didn’t exactly have a great deal of experience when it came to women, but a large majority of the ones who made it in the merc profession had a certain hardness of character to them, a chip in their shoulder he understood all too well... really, it only made sense in the occasionally cutthroat business they engaged in.

This seemed so… delicate. He could imagine the kind of girl who wore ribbons in her hair and still tried so hard to fight free for her independence. That kind of girl didn’t belong in Shinra’s sloppy, power-hungry hands.

...Could she belong in theirs?

“Cloud?”

There was a question in Sephiroth’s voice, and Cloud realized the conversation had fallen silent - but there was already a look of resigned  _knowing_ as well. There were few people on the Planet who could know the vagaries of Cloud’s mind as well as Cloud himself - and Sephiroth would always sit right there at the top of the list.

“May we talk to them?” he asked at last. “I think there’s been a problem with Shinra’s paperwork.”

The station chief’s eyebrows rose, and while he said nothing for a long moment, there was a wary satisfaction in his eyes that said maybe he was more than a little fed up with royal busybodying himself.

“Well now. I think I might be able to swing that… for a few minutes, you understand.”

“That’ll be satisfactory. I also imagine the posted bail to be extensive. I’m prepared to pay it for both of them.”

It was a calculated risk, but the city was a merc center for good reason… and this Officer Allens seemed like he knew the schtick.

The eyebrows went up again, but Allens shook his head firmly. “Standard. This’ll be by the book… I don’t want any problems with the Turks. But sometime this year if you feel the need to increase your crew's public volunteer patrol hours around this sector, well, I wouldn’t say no.”

“...Deal.”

Cloud knew how to hide the surprise in his voice as well as anyone, but he hadn’t really expected there to be any good people left in the city’s justice system to make this  _easy_ . Saying that aloud would probably have been an insult though, so he kept his peace and saved the admiration for later.

More’s the pity. Everyone likes to be appreciated.

“--You sure you want to do this, kid? I don’t need to tell you that this’ll put you on the top of Shinra’s shit list. Not a lot of companies can take that kind of heat.”

Sephiroth chuckled at that, and it was a low, melodious sound that didn’t happen all that often in public - possibly because it held such an edge of his old cruelty. In it, Cloud could hear every thread of their long, tangled history with Shinra as though they were words in a song. “That is something I think I would  _enjoy_ seeing.”

Allens bristled a little at that, but only as any sane man might do in the face of a sociopath - his hand stayed firmly away from his holster, and he never fidgeted even once. Self-control at its best. Cloud was liking this man more and more.

“Well,” he said at last, “I guess you’re going to need this.”

He handed Cloud a pen.

xx

“Took your time, didn’t you?” Zack sang out, his grin lighting up the room. He’d been regaling the officer sitting across from him with a story that appeared to involve a broomstick, a shuttlecock, and a Summon in the middle of a Wutain war zone that had the poor man in stitches.

If Cloud didn’t know better, Zack might have looked completely and utterly at his ease. He was still handcuffed, but he sat with his forearms braced on the desk, hands clasped as if it were the norm.

But Cloud did know better and he saw at a glance the foot jiggling like a habit Zack didn't have, the unfeigned relief in his eyes when he looked around at them and smiled as brilliantly as a sunbeam.

"Dumbass," Cloud replied, and while his voice came out disgruntled, he couldn’t hide the affectionate note in it either.

Zack had that effect on people.

"Waiting to see what kind of bad habits I'd pick up from the inmates?" Zack continued easily, never missing a beat. "You're S-O-L my friend. I couldn't let them take my girl out of my sight... I'd probably never see her again, and I just can't afford that, you know?

“I mean, look at this sly fox," he gestured at the cop sitting right across from him, whose eyes looked bigger than his uniform, "This Officer R. J. Hainesman, here. Next thing I know, he'll be laying on the moves so thick and fast, I’ll come back from processing to see he’s already got a rock on her finger.”

Cloud didn’t think he’d ever seen ears turn so red.

“You just enjoy making things difficult,” he groused instead as Allens came in behind them and gestured meaningfully to the four officers in the room. After a short, whispered exchange, two of them exited through a door off to the side, the other two brushed past him through the door they’d just entered.

Very quietly, Allens spoke up next to Cloud’s ear, “Ten minutes, no audio. If you need some privacy from the camera, your best bet is right up against the north wall. That’ll give you ten seconds before I have to send a uniform in.”

“I’ll take care of it,” Cloud assured him. Allens only gave a curt nod and shut the door firmly behind him.

The moment the door shut, Cloud could have sworn even Zack’s spiky hair relaxed a little. “Gods Cloud, I have never had to talk so much in my _life_ .”

“Hardly your worst punishment,” Sephiroth noted dryly.

Zack opened his mouth to speak, but another voice piped up instead. “I’m very sorry.”

Cloud hadn’t even seen the girl - though of course he knew she had to have been there. Hadn’t Zack said he wasn’t letting her out of his sight?

And when he saw her… he didn’t know how he could have missed her. Even half-hidden by Zack’s larger frame, Aeris Gainsborough had eyes that could look right through you - and probably did.

Power came and went in a city like Midgar - he could pass six mercs on the street capable of wrestling Behemoths before breakfast without counting to 200. He’d never seen anyone who looked like she could convince one to eat out of her hand and then take her for a piggyback ride after.

Right now, those eyes were a little ashamed and downcast. Cloud’s fingers actually twitched from the sudden impulse to brush her hair away from her face.

“I didn’t know,” she told him, standing up and stepping around Zack. Her hands were cuffed and she’d clasped them tightly together, otherwise he had the sense that she would have reached out to him. “I’ve always run. Whenever there was trouble, I’ve always managed to get away. This time I didn’t… I couldn’t leave him behind. I didn’t know it would make things worse.”

She was dressed in scuffed, skintight leather and her hair was wild - her bangs stuck up almost vertically in areas, and tufts of it kept escaping the curling twist of her braid.

Cloud wasn’t sure when was the last time he’d found a woman so entrancing he was physically incapable of tearing his eyes away. He knew that glow, of Cetra, but even he had never seen it this pure, never this… powerful.

She flicked her eyes up from the general vicinity of his toes to peek at his expression… and then she blinked, her eyes widening with fascination. “You’re… you’re Cloud?”

“I… yes.”

She stepped closer, and her very presence was like a set of blinkers - his entire field of vision narrowed down to her, just her.

"They told me... I'd heard stories," she said, her voice hushed, her eyes drawing him down as though she could see right through to the very beginnings of his long, uncertain history. "I never thought you'd actually..." she trailed off, and her face grew a little sad.

"You never thought what?"

She shook her head. "Your eyes are like eternity," she said with a little hitch in her laugh, "they go on forever.

“They call me the Ancient, you know," she added, taking his hand gently in hers, "but you give that name the lie, don't you? Next to you, we’re fireflies."

She knew.

On her tiptoes, she kissed him. It was sweet, achingly sweet, a soft brush of her lips that he didn't pull away from until she did. When she opened her eyes, they were unfocused and soft... and he wasn't so sure his were much better. In that briefest of moments she shared a piece of that old sadness, and it tasted like rain.

"Cloud."

Sephiroth's voice wasn't jealous or angry, but there was a certain nuance in it that made Cloud stand up straighter and take notice.

Nothing about Sephiroth had changed either - not his face, not his pose, but there was still a strange quality of uncertainty that hovered over his features.

It seemed so oddly displaced on that angular, heart-shaped face he knew so well… not least because Sephiroth walked the earth with an arrogance born of near-godlike invulnerability. In the years since Jenova’s power had touched their lives, nothing had shaken that but once.

Aeris swiveled to look at him too, sensing the source of unease as unerringly as a shark - if the simile could be so stretched as to encompass such a friendly, well-meaning face as hers.

Cloud could see Zack too, the last dregs of startled surprise fading into rueful fondness. "Aww shit... see this is just what I was afraid of, guys."

Cloud envied that sort of straightforward instinct in Zack - of whom to trust and where and when - and he could see that Sephiroth, who didn’t have the same instinct, but had learned in years long past to trust Zack, noted this as well.

“I’ve heard stories of you too,” Aeris said to Sephiroth, with a brilliant smile and an excitement that seemed almost to bewilder him, “you changed the world when you challenged Shinra… you humbled him in his own city, and he still lets it lie. I used to wish…"

She shook her head, and her face was shy. “Well, we can't all be you."

Sephiroth looked slightly mollified, and Cloud breathed a little easier.

She held out her hands to Sephiroth, and he took them in one of his with only a moment of hesitation, politely pressing his lips to the back of one. He even smiled - a faint, formal smile, but no less real - when she beamed so happily up at him as he did.

"Please tell me you've got a plan," Zack said after a moment, "because I don’t know if my heart can take it if we can’t keep her now.”

Sephiroth hadn’t quite let go of her hand yet, so Aeris turned her head just enough to playfully stick her tongue out at his grinning, light-hearted face - so open and confident that all would be at rights. But his words had a sobering effect on her and when she turned back, she looked nervous. “I wanted to ask… I’d like to…”

She stopped. Breathed. Started again.

“I need bodyguards,” she said, with a cheerfulness that rang like a lie. “Can I hire you?”

That, Sephiroth confessed many years later to Cloud, was when he’d felt the first flicker of admiration for this woman - her hands had gone as cold as ice in his, but she had still stood so resolutely, armed only with a brave face and a smile while her freedom hung in the balance.

There was a pause as Cloud and Sephiroth exchanged looks - the way only the two of them could, like they didn’t need words.

“Well, that’s unfortunate,” Sephiroth began, a tiny glimmer of amusement in the green of his eyes.

“Is it?”

Cloud didn’t know her very well, but he was proud of this girl who never let her voice quaver, even though the shadow of disappointment darkened her face. He also couldn’t help the tiny sliver of amusement at Zack’s expense, when Zack’s boots dropped to the ground with a thump of protest.

“It is,” he said, angling himself so that his hands were not visible from the cameras, “you see, we--” he glanced again at Sephiroth once just to be  _sure_ , and was met with a very slight nod, “--have already hired  _you_ .”

“I… what?”

She wasn’t stupid, there was a sudden lightness in her that glowed like a jewel. Cloud palmed the papers with the flourish of a card sharp, and was startled by the warmth that kindled in his chest at her happiness.

“They’re both assholes,” Zack said with a relieved shake of his head, “complete and utter  _assholes_ . You’ll get used to it. That’s why I want you, doll. I need someone else in my corner when it comes to water-gunning them back.”

Aeris's laugh was a little slow as if she were still absorbing the entire thing, but her mouth could certainly still keep apace with Zack’s: "Don't say that until we get our materia, silly, you're giving away the home advantage."

Cloud thought she’d probably do just fine.

“We don’t have long,” he cautioned her, as he made a scribbling motion with his hand and stepped back to tap gently against the wall, “so I’m going to show those nice officers the mix-up in the paperwork. You’re one of mine, and Shinra can't use your freelance status to rope you under his umbrella until your contract is up - high-priority case or not."

Aeris started pacing, her eyes straying to Zack as she inched closer and closer to Cloud and the wall in question with every balletic swivel. He didn't say a word, just winked lazily, and she seemed to take heart from it.

"I know you didn't have much time to go over the terms at our last meeting, so I'm willing to review after this is finished."

"Is that all it'll take? Officer Zeikens said the military was mobilizing around the city."

She palmed the pen from Cloud's hand fairly well - no fumbling, no awkward movements - as he took up the chatter with a laugh, "The blues know us, and we've got docs. It'll be fine when we leave. I know you were keen on visiting your folks, but I think we'll house you while we make sure the royals get the news. I'd hate for there to be any... misunderstandings... while we weren't around."

"Smart," she said, grabbing the folio on her next pass, the dark leather nearly invisible against her suit, "I just need to get word out."  
Signing wasn't a problem, but her hand shook a little when she passed it back and she fumbled the pen. It was Cloud's own quick flourish that saved it - though he barely caught it out of the air between his fingers.

He found himself checklisting things he wanted her to learn, to practice… as if she really were going to be a part of his team, and not just someone he was trying to save.

Allens's response was as quick as he'd expected - the officer barged back in within seconds, banging the door against the wall with a crack like a rifle shot. His voice was a loud bark of sound: "Back in front and center where the cameras can see you, missy. I'm doing you a courtesy, not giving you favors. You behave now."

Aeris retreated with a sheepishly woebegone look, her hands up and placating.

"In fact, I think that's enough for visiting hours - this isn't the Honeybee I'm running, and I saw those kissy faces you three were making. You two, you say you got your papers, you show 'em to me or you get out. My boys have work to do."

Cloud bowed his head in acknowledgment. "Of course, Officer. Zack, Aeris, this is coming out of your pay - I hope you know that."

He swept out with Sephiroth like a paler shadow at his back, balefully ignoring Zack's curses. If the situation hadn't still been so tense, he might even have been tempted to smile.

Time enough later for that.

xx

"Looks like you signed on for one hell of a handful," Allens muttered as he settled heavily into the squashy seat behind his desk, "those clowns are gonna get you in something hot one of these days, you just count on it."

"Maybe," Cloud replied, settling easily into his own chair as if his ass weren't perched on a cushion probably fashioned out of a rock, "but there's something to be said about clowns that'll do their damndest to get you right back out again too, don't you think?"

There was a pause.

" _Mercs_ ," Allens said explosively, as if it were a curse, but his eyes were twinkling, "you think you're such hardasses but you're all so damned sentimental."

Cloud shrugged," A man can be both."

“Right. Well, let’s see about you getting your people out of here. You can pay, I take it?”

Cloud smiled.

Allens sighed, “‘Least that’s one thing that’ll go smoothly.”

\--Cloud wasn’t smiling by the time they’d ironed out the transaction, but that was fine… he’d all but decided that this one really _was_ coming out of Zack’s payout. Couldn’t they have just gotten a fucking  _room?_

“There’ll be legal problems,” the cop warned him when they’d finished. “You’re still legally bound to make it to court for this, and the crown won’t be kind on you in there.”

Sephiroth shrugged - an elegant, old-world gesture that could mean everything and nothing. "I suspect it won't make it that far," he said with a pause, acknowledging a lawman's natural feeling against this breach in the order of justice, "but if it does, they will not be happy to see me.”

Cloud made a sound of amusement. “And if that doesn’t strike fear into their hearts,” he added, “I’d wager a golden chocobo against anyone who thinks they’ve got a better head for case law than you.”

There was a long silence from Allens who just looked at them as if he weren’t entirely sure he hadn’t bitten off more than he could possibly chew. Then he let out a laugh like a shout, cackling uproariously and slapping his desk with a large, meaty hand. “You’re really them, I guess. The big guys that have Shinra running scared. I wasn’t sure when you first came in but I’m pretty damn sure now.

“I like you. You’ve got guts... and a few grains of sense holding ‘em together which is more important in my mind. You think you got this-- well, I’m willing to give you the go-ahead. Don’t make this a routine event, understand... I’ve got enough paperwork to do around here.”

Cloud sketched a half-salute. “No arguments here, Officer. I’ve even got a merc in your holding that’s perfect for the job if you want him - he just  _loves_ paperwork.”

Godsall knew it’d do the bastard good to sit  _still_ for once.


	2. Rearrangements

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It may have been a hasty decision, saving the Aeris girl. Not just because they took away a toy Shinra desperately wants, but because Jenova's power is still awake and aware, and not only her avatar controls all the strings.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Goodness, this took a lot longer than I thought it would to complete. It was mostly done more than a year ago when I first posted the first chapter, but I never thought I'd get so stymied right near the end. School and work things happened, I got distracted by other fics, but I could let sexy times between Cloud and Sephiroth just sit there in Drive, never seeing the light of day. So here it is: not perfect (at least, not to me), but here at last.

Some hours later, Cloud was on the couch again, stripped down to a pair of pants and exactly one sock. Sephiroth rested just behind him, braced against one generously plush arm, a dark silk robe hanging loosely off his shoulders as he stared moodily out the window. 

Cloud tilted his head back to watch him, a faint sense of worry crinkling the lines between his brows again. “You think we were too hasty?” he asked, almost afraid of the answer.

Sephiroth didn’t say anything for a moment, his fingers carding the soft spokes of Cloud’s hair almost aimlessly. “I… am concerned about the person that I am around her,” he said at last. “There is a weight to her, a power that the Mother does not like. There’s a violence between us that I don’t understand.”

“You think she’s trouble?” 

Sephiroth chuckled, and the sound was curiously empty - not unhappy, perhaps, but there was a strangely discordant note that Cloud had never heard in the dark velvet of his voice before. “Not in the sense you do. I think... perhaps that page has turned already, Cloud.”

That didn’t help in the least. “I don’t-- Sephiroth, she doesn’t have to  _ stay _ .” 

“I think she needs to. If we mean to keep her safe - and, Cloud, I intend to - I think nothing else will suffice.” Sephiroth’s fingers slid down Cloud’s throat, nails rasping against his skin in a way that made him shudder.

“I don’t understand you sometimes, Seph,” he murmured, and the words were breathless.

“I am very easy to understand,” Sephiroth’s hair slid down against his cheek as he leaned in, teeth skimming the shell of Cloud’s ear. “She is untried and untutored, but we have a mage on our hands, the like of which I have never seen before.”

Cloud slid upwards, high enough so that he had enough leverage to nuzzle in against Sephiroth’s neck, “You always talk business at… the worst times… you know that?”

Sephiroth chuckled again - and this time, it was  _ his _ voice, full of that deep promise that always got to Cloud, that could make him forget lifetimes. When he could narrow down to just this, just now, rather than string it through the length of all the rest, it was like being… young.

“It’s always worth a little curiosity knowing who would best whom,” Sephiroth continued, and Cloud could feel the smile as Sephiroth’s tongue flicked out to lap at the edge of his jaw, “but there is something else. I think she senses it too.”

“Are you going to ask her?”

Sephiroth paused… an artful, perfectly plotted motion that stopped him just seconds before his fingertips grazed Cloud’s nipples. “I don’t know how that might end.” 

Cloud’s eyelashes fluttered as he caught Sephiroth’s eyes - so uncertain again, so  _ un-Sephiroth _ \- and he almost laughed. If the man was asking  _ permission--  _ “I can hazard a guess. Sex or death, Sephiroth, that’s what you bring. It’s also what I happened to hire you for.”

But Sephiroth wasn’t going to be joked out of his seriousness just yet, even as he closed his teeth briefly on Cloud’s lip for his cheek, “I don’t want to kill her.”

Cloud smiled, and reached up to pull him down for a kiss, a real kiss that wasn’t play or promise. “I like her too,” he pointed out. “And we might be well past the point of a second opinion when it comes to picking out new curtains, you know.”

“I do like them the way they are,” Sephiroth murmured, finally giving in to Cloud’s determined levity, his hand scrolling down the tight planes of Cloud’s belly to his waistband, the front buttons that fell open with the merest twist of his wrist, the tight bulge of his cock straining against the fabric. 

Cloud made an inarticulate noise, his fingers gripping the hard muscles at the juncture between Sephiroth’s neck and his powerful shoulders. “Seph…”

"Hmmnn," Sephiroth murmured, gripping him through his pants with the hard, squeezing touch he knew Cloud liked. That seemed to satisfy him - enough to continue the game without missing a beat. “So, you like her, do you?”

Cloud jerked up with a sharp cry - and for a number of reasons: that was just downright  _ mean  _ of Sephiroth to take what he’d said out of--! and then there was the grinding rock of Sephiroth’s hips against the small of his back, while the hand that had been gripping his shaft through his pants changed minutely so that he could feel Sephiroth’s fingertips spreading further down between his thighs.

His legs fell open as Sephiroth’s hand slid in underneath his pants - almost, but not quite, unbearably tight - the cool of the mage’s skin flush against the hot pulsing heat of his cock. 

“What did she taste like?” Sephiroth whispered, his voice a low burr of sound in a register Cloud hadn’t known he even possessed. His laugh came out like a hiss between his teeth as he struggled manfully with the waist of his pants, the silky slickness of his boxers: “I don’t think I was in the best position to ask, Sephiroth.”

He got a soft snarl in response as Sephiroth’s other hand caught the point of his chin, drew it back at such an angle as to the brink of pain, “I felt something pass between you two in the station, Cloud. It felt like…” he was at a loss for words, but only for a moment, “...like Reunion.”

_ \-- _ **_ReUNIoN_ ** _ \-- _

An electric spark sizzled through the both of them, and Cloud jerked his face away, slammed shut his flickering eyelids as he felt Jenova’s consciousness waken-- and attack. It hit like pain, a buzz of sudden awareness as his body locked up and then rejected the invasion. His breath came out in a grunt and the only other outer sign as he fought off Jenova’s clutches was the wash of green witchlight that streaked through the blue of his eyes in jerky flashes like the fuzzy picture in an old TV screen, the pupils flickering - slitted one moment, normal the next. 

“ _ Control her! _ ” he hissed, whipping around so that he was kneeling over the mage, reaching out to cradle the sides of Sephiroth’s face between his hands. He might not have been SOLDIER, but he was leader, and leader in more than name. Cloud was immortal and he was  _ old _ \- if you lived long enough, even if you had little enough power in you to start with, you begin to absorb it from the world you walked in, as though drawing it in through your very skin.

Cloud hadn’t had a very good idea back then of what kind of power had slept inside him, but he’d had a long, long time to learn.

That energy curled around the two of them, a warm electric blanket of awareness and support, as Sephiroth yanked that consciousness down and crushed her back into her cold iron cage. 

Cloud found he could breathe again. It hadn't been much, but Sephiroth’s control was no small thing, and this was the second time today that it had slipped, even remotely. Cloud wasn't terribly superstitious, but it did make him wonder about the viability of long-term working arrangements with the Gainsborough girl, no matter what Sephiroth intended.

"Well," he said at last. "That puts a bit of a damper on things."

Not 100% of course. He was still hard (although not quite at full mast anymore - deep-rooted concern did not come as much of an aphrodisiac) but sometimes you had to overlook your own libido in the interest of the other party's sanity and give them an out if they wanted it.

Sephiroth was silent for a moment, green eyes unreadable. Then, ruefully, "Perhaps a different scope of subject for the time being."

"That'll do me," Cloud replied with his cheekiest grin, though it sat somewhat awkwardly on his face. He sat back on his haunches so that he wasn't hovering foolish and ineffectual over that too-serious face anymore. He wasn’t Zack - for whom the right smile and the right words always seemed to come at just the right time - and it simply wasn’t that easy to break away from the long-learned solemnity of immortal life. But he could try… and some older-than-the-gods quality about Sephiroth allowed him to try. 

Seph just  _ looked  _ like he needed it so damned much.

Sephiroth acknowledged Cloud’s open entendre with a raised eyebrow and a faint smile, but didn't take the bait. Instead, he reached up to Cloud's face, fingers tracing the point of his chin again. This time the touch was gentle as he tugged Cloud in for a kiss. 

For the space of a long-held breath, it was… sweet.

The weight of what they were never left them, not truly... so that whenever they fucked or made love or even shared a glance, a kiss, a touch, the past always hung there between them. It was a goad to pleasure sometimes (a lot of the time, if he were very, very honest) and they’d learned to find the beauty in that. But then there were brief, perfect moments like this, like gold beads in a string of stones, that he both cherished and hated in equal parts, because it made him a little wistful of all the what-might-have-beens. 

Once upon a time, Cloud had had a mother. She was dust in the earth now, and that was… that was okay. It was life, how it was supposed to be, and he'd accepted long ago that he stood apart from that. The pain of it had faded - not gone, perhaps, but it had weathered in the ages since - and yet sometimes he still imagined her sweet, somewhat fractured mind and what it would be like to introduce a man like Sephiroth to her table.

When he pulled away, there was a quiet smile playing across his features, and even behind his lowered lashes, he could see a drowsy, unguarded expression on Sephiroth’s own. He reached down, the roughness of his callused thumb catching on the softness of Sephiroth’s lips.

Then, because it could never stay that way between the two of them, he leaned in to break that moment with a second kiss and this time it wasn’t sweet. Their mouths were open, hot, and his tongue slid against Sephiroth’s with a long, slow drag that brought the good kind of shiver down the full length of his spine. Sephiroth made a sound low in his throat, a very human, but very deep hum of distinct appreciation.

Maybe he wished sometimes that they could be other than themselves, but that would mean erasing so much of what they already were. And that just wasn’t worth it. They were... they were Cloud and Sephiroth, and that was a good fucking thing.

With the flat of his tongue, Cloud licked his way down the hard muscles of Sephiroth’s chest, his stomach, veering back up only once he got to the plain dark waistband of his pants and tugged at it playfully with his teeth, his eyes rolled up to catch the look in Sephiroth’s eyes. 

The mage wasn't smiling, exactly, and there was a lazy, indifferent cast to the shape of his mouth... but there was an eagerness in those green eyes that he didn’t bother to hide, and  _ that _ was what really hit the good spots for Cloud. 

His lips closed in small, open-mouthed kisses back up Sephiroth’s stomach, kneading the hard muscles underneath with just the pressure of his lips. Male was male and Sephiroth flexed them under the weight of Cloud’s attentions, a soft-skinned expanse of iron that shuddered when Cloud’s hands came up to cradle the fine arch of Sephiroth’s back and ran the roughness of his callused fingers up and down, up and down.

Cloud and Zack both packed a ton of hours in the gym lifting weights in order to keep the heavy muscles that padded their bodies. Nor were they exactly known for skipping leg day - there was no one in Midgar left who was willing to take Zack's bet in a squats challenge against Cloud. But if Sephiroth lifted weights to maintain that magnificent body of his, Cloud didn't know it. 

There were meditative retreats from time to time, long disappearances where he sought out the naturally-occurring materia wells and the old demon shrines to commune with the awakened consciousness of the Mother and wrestle with her in the age-old struggle for dominance. He returned from these in silence with the bitter taste of ash on his skin and the flicker of alien fires in his eyes. Cloud didn’t know if those pilgrimages were what locked Sephiroth’s body in time and left it utterly unchanged… but whatever the reason, the mage just didn’t have to sweat the physical labors of upkeep like the rest of them anymore.

In moments like this, with the lean, heavy muscles sliding against his fingertips, and the silk of Sephiroth’s hair (which never seemed to tangle whether in wind, battle, or sex) growing warm against his skin, Cloud could admit to a little envy. Sephiroth could burn a man to a cinder in the space of a thought, but he had the strength and the speed to make his devotion to the magic seem like such a colossal waste of a warrior’s body. 

He’d stayed still thinking too long, his eyes open and unseeing as his lips hovered over the mage's skin. Sephiroth never said a word, idly stroking himself as he waited and watched, as though Cloud's face said more than he thought it did. 

There was a sense of humor in there, one that had been hard-won after... well, after everything. Enough that there was the very faintest hint of laughter lines at the corners of that beautiful mouth - barely visible, even with SOLDIER eyes. And right now those eyes were laughing at him, only a little. 

Cloud felt an answering smile tug at his own lips. "Sorry," he said, even though he knew he didn't really need to. "I was just thinking how the magic can make you so lazy about all of this." He poked Seph in the belly with an accusatory finger. 

Sephiroth caught his hand and delicately lapped up the length of his middle finger, then slowly drew it into his mouth in a long, sucking line, his eyes knowing and never leaving Cloud's own. 

Cloud shivered, and this time it was sex.

"Would you rather I came with the two of you, sweating and pumping like one of the Brothers?" Sephiroth asked when he'd pulled his mouth away, his lips still brushing against Cloud's fingertips when he spoke. "I could."

Cloud didn't need help making  _ that _ mental image. 

"Maybe not," he said, and his voice was only the tiniest bit shaky, "Or at least not without fair warning. I don't know if I could handle it without dropping something embarrassing on myself."

Sephiroth smiled, and there was warmth in that normally austere curve of his lips. 

"I've often thought the same," he murmured, pushing Cloud back until he was kneeling upright again. With sure, inarguable motions, Sephiroth finished what Cloud had started there - he dragged the slippery, shiny material of his boxers down over his hips, tangling with his pants around his knees. 

It took a little rearranging after that for both of them, and while Cloud found himself hopping on one foot for half a second as he struggled to get his pants off, Sephiroth just spilled gracefully to his knees on the carpet's dark blue plush pile. Before Cloud could get a word in edgewise (possibly to bitch again), Sephiroth had very firmly closed his mouth around Cloud's cock and sucked him down until his lips hit the base. 

_ Fuckkkk _ .

There was laughter in those eyes still, a gentle mockery that Cloud recognized - but now it just reminded him too much of... of before, when that look in Sephiroth’s eyes had meant pain. 

Cloud had hated that look then, and he hated it a little now - it wasn't pretend that gave him such a deep satisfaction and almost aggressive vindication to watch Sephiroth on his knees, his mouth wrapped around Cloud’s cock and his throat working around the tip. 

Of course, even in this Sephiroth was masterful - not just his skill with lips, throat, and oh fuck that  _ tongue _ \- but his unerring attentiveness to the game. Utterly arrogant, or perhaps just supremely confident, Sephiroth could play him to that knife edge of anger, and then keep him there, never quite spilling over into rage. 

It was acknowledging what they'd been, like this, that let them be what they were now.

His fingers snaked through Sephiroth’s hair, and then he bundled all of it into a thick mass in his fist, right near the base of Sephiroth’s head, holding the mage’s head immobile at a sharply oblique angle. One of those elegant silver brows arched in a question... and a dare. 

Oh, Cloud dared. With a thin, almost unpleasant smile of his own, he stroked his thumb tenderly over the stretched skin of the other man's bottom lip and cupped his cheek. Sephiroth leaned into that hand, eyes unblinking... and without words, it was permission. 

Cloud drove his hips forward in quick, hard thrusts - pushing deep into that open mouth and then withdrawing, spurred on by the gratifyingly thick, wet sounds it made in Sephiroth’s throat. The mage's head tilted back obligingly, his tongue slick against the underside and just the very edge of teeth scraping delicately above. 

There was a fine glow flickering in the depths of Sephroth's gems, a steady pulse that beat in time to Cloud's heart in his throat as he kept up the rapid smack of his cock down that tight, sucking heat. He shivered at the sight of the hot flush growing in Sephiroth’s pale face and the heavy-lidded drape of his lashes, the hard gasp when the mage drew back sharply for air.

The magic wrapped around the both of them, heavy and thick as syrup, a shifting, pulsing wash of heat that lit their skin so that they shone, faintly, even in the dim light. 

Cloud shut his eyes, and his breath hissed through his teeth when he felt Sephiroth’s fingers. Slick and cool and dripping with lube, they slid up between the hard, bunched muscles of his thighs, and slipped in between the curve of his buttocks. With a soft groan he widened his stance and planted one foot on the couch, never breaking his own rhythm while Sephiroth’s fingers worked inside him - pressing, twisting, working the thick gel liberally inside. 

Cloud’s orgasm came first as a fine shuddering in his muscles, his hand clenching around Sephiroth’s hair, his other hand flicking helplessly at his own nipples. Then it built and he looked down at Sephiroth’s eyes, those strange, beautiful eyes that were as clear as a mirror, at the stretched oval of his lips, and the heady heat of his desire. 

“I'm going to--” he choked out, and Sephiroth’s reply was a purring little hum, one hand reaching up to cup and squeeze Cloud’s balls, three fingers of the other still plunged deep inside him. 

Gods,  _ yes.  _

He came with a quiet shout, his head flung back and his hands framing Sephiroth’s face. Sephiroth didn't move away for several moments - in fact, he sucked gently for nearly a minute more, milking the last, thickest drops with an almost animal pleasure. 

Body shuddering at what was almost  _ too much  _ sensation, Cloud moaned when Sephiroth pulled away. He watched the mage through dark lashes low with that delicious languor of release… but his body was still keyed. He was in fact downright  _ wanton,  _ rocking into Sephiroth’s fingers, so fucking eager for more. 

It might even have been embarrassing if he weren’t buoyed up by the desire written in Sephiroth’s face. And Cloud was very, very certain that as good as he felt right then, freed of both the old rage and the burning immediacy of release… he was going to give the mage damn well as good as he got. 

It was Sephiroth’s raised eyebrows and the intrigued look in those naga eyes that made Cloud realize that some of the fiendish bent of his thoughts had made it all the way onto his face.

Time beyond memory had taught Cloud better control than that - but there was something about Sephiroth that stripped that away and laid him bare. 

He hadn’t let go of Sephiroth’s hair yet, and he used it then to urge the other man to his feet, shivering at the long, languorous slide of those heavy muscles against his skin. Like the deceptively effortless coil of a snake rearing its head but locked with the syrupy effects of a Slow, Sephiroth gained his footing easily and towered over him, head bent forward so that Cloud could keep that tight hold on his hair. 

And yet, gods damn him, even with bowed head and submission in the lines of his neck, there was nothing in this universe that could make Sephiroth’s eyes anything other than his own, even in play. Which was all right, in the end. That was the way Cloud liked him best.

Liked? Or…

...

They didn't say... It didn't come up much, but--

Quietly, as if sensing his thoughts, Sephiroth leveled Cloud with a look that wouldn’t be ignored. "Do you know that I love you?"

\--Cloud blinked. Sephiroth's face was shuttered, but there was something in his eyes now. Something that rose up earnest and bright so that it eclipsed the arrogance for that one brief moment. 

He felt his heart skip a beat. It was one thing to catch the transient flash of real emotion in the mage’s icy aloofness, but it was rarer still to… to… 

Had… had Sephiroth ever actually said the words?

He… Cloud knew, of course. Kind of. There are words without words. It was there, in every touch, every glance they ever leveled at one another, in every action that they ever made. He knew. 

Perhaps he'd just forgotten - or had allowed himself to forget - that hearing the words could mean so much too. 

“When Jenova took you for her own, I thought that was the end,” he said slowly, his grip in Sephiroth’s hair loosening into a caress, “I thought all I'd have to hold onto was hate and despair.”

He settled both hands on the unscarred planes of Sephiroth’s chest and pushed, gently, until the man spilled back onto the couch. 

“I thought I’d have to kill you to win the Demon Wars,” he continued as he straddled Sephiroth’s hips, and pushed away the helping hands half-outstretched. “I thought I’d lose everything and all I’d have left would be dust in the grave. You can’t know…” 

The catch in his voice might have been saying the words, but it could also have been because that was when he slid down, down onto the thickness of Sephiroth’s cock - his fingers gripping it, guiding it in deeper inside himself, while Sephiroth rocked his hips gently, almost imperceptibly. Deeper and deeper, and Cloud bit back a groan when the mage was finally buried to the hilt inside. 

“You can't know…?” Sephiroth prompted, his voice a deep, silky baritone as he wrapped his fingers loosely around Cloud’s hips. He didn't move, this man of iron patience and hungry eyes; he waited and watched, his tongue flicking briefly at his lips. 

Cloud moved. That slow, churning rhythm that Sephiroth denied him, he took for himself, rising and falling, back and forth. "I was happy," Cloud ground out from between his teeth in an effort to keep the quiet groans, the sharp moans, from escaping too loudly, "I'd never felt so relieved. I looked into your face and your eyes… you were you again. They weren't  _ hers _ anymore, and you were still mine." 

Rise and fall, rise and fall; he didn't move any faster, but it was more forceful now, an audible smack-smack-smack that forced a groan out of Sephiroth, those elegant fingers clamping down tighter on his hips. It brought a fierce smile to Cloud's lips.

"Such a battle would have been glorious," Sephiroth pointed out, and there was a tightness to his voice that made Cloud shiver, an eagerness that the brief catch in the dark silk of his voice only underlined. "Our swords would have rung the shields of legend forever. I might have been a god with wings to blot out the sun."

Cloud was about to comment on the sheer  _ arrogance _ when Sephiroth continued, punctuating his words with deep, hard, upward thrusts - which quite drove all hint of coherent thought from Cloud's brain. "Or I might have fallen to your steel and your magic and cursed you while you damned me to the Lifestream. Do you think that might have happened?"

"You and I both know it very nearly did," Cloud hissed between his teeth as Sephiroth reached up to wrap a hand around the back of his neck and bury those ringed fingers in the fine hairs of Cloud's nape, using it to drive him down even harder. 

"Very nearly," Sephiroth allowed, his eyes glittering briefly with the fires of the past, but a sharp smile of pleasure at the fore. “And what a tale it would be for the survivors that rallied to your banner. Shinra himself might have bent the knee. For a time.”

“ _ Hungh, hnngh, hnghh-- _ ” Cloud’s grunts were in earnest now as Sephiroth slammed into him. He leaned forward, bracing his weight on his knees, his hands grabbing on hard to Sephiroth’s shoulders, fistfuls of silver hair spilling between his fingers. “But you came back,” he managed to gasp. 

“I came back,” Sephiroth agreed, his hand slipping down to wrap around Cloud’s cock. He was close: his voice roughening at last, his breath spilling out in tight puffs, the flicking, twisting, squeezing stroke of his hand at a pace with the ever-quickening churn of his hips. “I looked through the bars and I saw your face and saw my death in your eyes. I saw that it would kill something in you too.” 

Sephiroth paused, the brief moment as thoughtful as it was sexually frustrating, “I suppose we changed the world after all, in our own way.”

“We still are,” Cloud gasped, throwing his head back, feeling Sephiroth’s fingers tighten in his hair as that delicious, wonderful shudder built up for a second time in his muscles, and their movements finally lost all sense of rhythm. 

When he came, it was with a cry - his body trembling hard as Sephiroth’s writhed underneath him - fast, urgent, and hungry. He knew when Sephiroth came at last, he could feel it, he could taste it in the very air around them… and his mako eyes could also see when, for those brief, glorious moments, the pleasure wrapped around the two of them like bands of silk. The veils of the world shivered and split at the seams, and if it weren’t for the iron in Sephiroth’s hands, he might have fallen forward, down into that pit of flame, that demon-green roil of madness and corrupted Lifestream that swirled at the very core of Sephiroth’s soul.

And yet… and yet, in that fire, Sephiroth floated in a halo of light, wrapped in the glowing, plumed feathers of divinity.

It was a rush. Cloud never wanted to admit it, but he could never hide it - and the adrenaline that surged through him, electrified him, was nearly as good as the sex. And at the very bottom… he could see the dead, glowing eyes of Jenova watching him, waiting for him, locked inside her cage. 

Sephiroth knew. He drew Cloud’s body down, weighty and boneless, down against his chest, cradling Cloud’s head against his neck. Safe, safe… Sephiroth’s presence, the metronome of his heartbeat, was a stone in the cyclone as the elements shifted around them again, fading back into reality. 

They were themselves again and Cloud claimed that drowsy, honey golden moment of release and satisfaction to whisper against the skin of Sephiroth’s throat. “Love you too.”

It felt like he always had. Even when the hatred had burned just as hot and the anger had threatened to consume him whole… 

But for someone who’d lived lifetimes, that simply wasn't true and Cloud wasn't going to say it. Enough to have now, today,  _ this _ . 

Sephiroth’s only acknowledgment was the flex of his fingers against Cloud’s skin, the soft exhale into his hair, and the drape of the cool silk robe over them both. 

It was enough.

xx

Reality came back a few minutes later in a string of practicalities. They had to move; time to get up, clean up, because damn it he liked this couch and it was staying clean if he had anything to say about it. He felt the soft puff of Sephiroth’s laughter against his hair again because that last part he’d said out loud.

The mage might have said something more but they were interrupted by a chuckle in the doorway, and both of them turned to look.

“Look at you two spilling your sexy time all over the place,” drawled Zack, leaning casually against the frame, his eyes hot as he took the both of them in at a glance. “I’ll have you know I’ve got a lady with eyes like Lifestream propped up against a closet door right now ‘cause she can’t hold her feet around you two and that's just hard on the ego.”

“Not entirely true,” piped up a second, shakier voice from the doorway, bright with wry laughter. Another head popped out from behind Zack’s knee, “the lady is still mobile if maybe not quite upright.”

Zack reached down to pull her up in one smooth motion with all the sinuous grace of a cat. He held her braced against his body as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

Cloud quirked an eyebrow - there was something different about the way Zack moved. Not that he'd ever been a slouch, but Cloud had trained himself to a lifetime of observation... He knew how the demons moved, and he'd seen the echoes of those movements in Zack, and in Sephiroth too. Was that it? He was just… more? 

Whatever it was, Zack sat in his skin like he belonged in it at last. 

And Aeris… well, the robe was all well and good but there was no hiding what they'd been doing, nor the fact that he and Sephiroth both were still very, very naked. Yet in very Midgar fashion, she simply took it in stride and ignored it with dignity and aplomb. 

“I didn't mean to interrupt,” she said apologetically, but without a trace of a blush, as she shot an evil eye at a laughing Zack. “I can sense things sometimes… not well... not often... and I didn't think I'd be able to… I didn’t want to pry… but then the two of you…” 

And then she  _ did  _ blush, putting a hand over her mouth and groaning at herself.

Cloud caught the look in Zack’s eyes - a charmed smile that was so young, so human, so  _ happy,  _ he’d have given a lot more than a small ransom in gold to see it. 

"What you mean to say, perhaps," Sephiroth interposed politely, his face as unreadable as a statue though he lay naked with another man still in his lap, "is that the power speaks, and you can hear its song."

"That's exactly it!" Aeris exclaimed, startled, "Do you also...?"

"You are a child of the Lifestream," he replied with a light shake of his head, "and my life was pledged to other powers from the very first. The Planet doesn't speak to me, not in the same way."

A tiny spark of intuition glimmered in Aeris's expressive eyes, "But you can hear. In your own way."

"In my own way." 

Something passed between the two of them that neither Zack nor Cloud could read - a shivering in the air, weighty with things unsaid. Sephiroth turned away from it first, his eyes drifting to Cloud’s face, utterly impassive once more. 

If they'd been alone… well, what honestly would he have said? He'd made light of it earlier but… 

Cloud felt the muscles in Sephiroth’s shoulders bunch seconds before he felt the electricity - cold and sharp like the buzz of a thousand flies against his skin but with none of the heat.

_ \--tHE lasT-- _

Cloud shivered at the hungry rattle of Jenova’s mind-voice echoing behind his ears, and was startled to feel the brush of ghostly fingers through his hair as though in passing. It had never been like this. The still-living memory of the long-dead demon queen was suddenly... here.

xx

There was a strangled sound from Zack's corner, half a snarl that never quite made it past his lips. Cloud caught a sudden, defiant flash of razor teeth just before Aeris was jerked right out of his grasp - with the force of a small giant, her body was flung through the air like a ragdoll, and she crashed into the opposite wall with a loud smash.

Aeris cried out only once - when she landed in a heap on the ground and she tried to break her fall in broken glass.

That broke Jenova's spell on the room. He'd fucking  _ liked _ those pictures. And Aeris...

They all moved to her, Sephiroth as fast as either Cloud or Zack, but Zack was there first, his face nearly unrecognizable in its rage.

They couldn't touch her. It was like floating in mako again, smashing their fists against impenetrable crystal, their movements sluggish, swimming through soup. Jenova's laughter was like the buzz of insects, stronger than ever, the chatter of her evil curses clacking in a million dry tongues. 

Sephiroth caught his eye - there was concern, and deep, deep down, Cloud sensed the fear as well. For so long Sephiroth had been the conduit; he wielded her power but kept the yawning maw of her hunger at bay. That… wasn’t going to change now, was it? The cage was still there, the bars still held her back, but somehow Jenova’s power was still here,  _ here _ , and very much her own.

The others might not know the history of that power quite so well, but Cloud did. Oh, how he did. 

The Cetra. The Ancient Ones. They had died in droves from Jenova's influence, or were forever changed into her creatures, almost from the first - there had been no race of people then and since that had been so susceptible. Was he now going to watch her die, the last twisted and crying at his feet like the first?

_ \--haLFBREed-- _

There was a dark thread of disgust in Jenova's voice that marred the ring of her triumph. There was too much human in this one, too much that made her curses run at a crawl through the blood. 

“ _ Disgusting. _ ”

Cloud stopped, because that was Aeris’s voice, thin and thready but with an unexpected tang of steel. Crouched in on herself, she reached with surprisingly steady fingers to deliberately pluck the pieces of glass out of her right palm. 

“I know what you are,” Aeris whispered, magic in her voice rising like the roar of a waterfall, “and I know what you’ve done. You’ve killed…” she faltered for a moment, her eyes roving before settling on Cloud’s.

There was nothing that rose in him to the scent of her blood in the air - he didn’t have a shred of real demon living in him, not like the others - but he felt that tangible thread of communion again. It was as though for the briefest of moments, she was standing there with him, looking down at the remains of a people that had lived peacefully for time beyond memory and shared in that sorrow.

“...I am the last and you won’t have me.”

The last piece of glass she kept, clenching her fingers around it with a grimace until the blood welled up and dripped down between her fingers. Then she dropped it, balled that hand into a fist, and slammed it as hard as she could into the air in front of her. 

Maybe it looked ridiculous to a bystander, but between the four of them it was like flicking a glass with a fingernail - the air around her rang like a bell and echoed with the touch. She hit it again, then once more, the sound louder and louder until with a sound that wasn't sound, the space between them shivered immaterially and her fingers touched Zack’s at last… Zack, who had not once stopped fighting to reach her.

That was it. He could get get no closer, but the air thickened around them in a cloud of green like a Cure without healing. Cloud had never seen the Planet rouse itself so readily for one of its own, and watched with amazement as she ignored the angry buzz of Jenova’s wrath and kept pushing deeper into the green of the Planet’s kiss.

Zack’s nostrils flared and his eyes were drawn magnetically to the blood flowing freely from her palm as she pressed their entwined fingers ever closer to his face. He swayed forward but hesitated, his eyes darting up to hers to gauge what she would do. 

“It’s okay,” she promised him, with a voice utterly removed from their situation - so unbearably kind and knowing - as though they had all the time in the world. “Please… I need you.”

That was enough. His tongue flicked out immediately, tasting her with a shudder that ran in ripples down the lines of his body and even through the wild spikes of his hair... as though he had more than mere flesh and bone hiding just under the skin. 

At the touch of her blood to his tongue, his eyes ignited - the blue-white fire of his Limits wheeling around the pupil like liquid fire.

“That’s it,” she murmured, eyes hazy with Lifestream, “let him out.” She held Zack as if he were a lifeline while her eyes turned inward, grasping for clarity of will that was still so new, still so alien. 

Gods take her, could she really do it?

“The demons aren't all hers - they never have been. She's forgotten already that the one who came so close to razing the earth was her son… never her.”

_ \--SHe daRES!-- _

With a loud roar and a backwash of heat that blew Cloud back into a fighter’s crouch, hot orange witchfire spiraled to life around Aeris like a nest of hissing snakes, a thousand mouths open and reared to strike. 

Zack's scream was a demon’s yowl of pain and rage - Cloud’s magic was at his fingertips in a second, a Cure charged and cast as quick as thought. He could see in the searing flesh of Zack’s arm the whirling fight between Aeris’s own sphere of healing stretching to cover him by inches, and the charred ruin that Jenova’s power promised. 

Cloud felt the swift chill of fear as he sought out the shape of Aeris’s face through the inferno… and did not expect the indomitable smile that flared to life. As if this had been exactly what she'd been waiting for. 

Seconds later, he realized it was. Jenova’s magic took on one element at a time, just like any other mage’s, and Aeris knew it. The impasse was gone. She reached with both arms to Zack and dragged him bodily forward, skin to skin, so that her power whirled around them both. Under her hands, the glow of Zack’s eyes were blinding, cutting through the flames as if they were ghostfire. 

His spell helped - he could see instantly how it punched through the fire and how the healing circle swallowed it up and surged forward - but he was not a spellcaster at heart and it was only a momentary help. Gods damn the Mother… if she would only give him something to fucking  _ shoot.  _

He fired off another Cure into that hole anyway, and then another, before he felt Sephiroth’s fingers close on the back of his neck, the intricate shapes of the mage’s rings digging into the skin. Then he felt Sephiroth’s magic, could  _ see _ it where he’d missed it before - a thin margin of wind, Aero, the rarest magic on the Planet of all, whirling in the space between Jenova’s fire and Aeris’s healing, whirling and deflecting, to keep one from eating away at the other.

Sephiroth’s gems were lit with a steady incandescence, his eyes narrow slits of glowing green ice as he concentrated, working with a magic he very rarely needed to use. 

There wasn't a question of asking - Cloud gave and Sephiroth siphoned that power into his spell. It was exquisite, that control, how it tucked every last trailing wisp of Cure in against the two they were trying to protect, how it spun in layer after new layer, expanding, spreading that sphere of fire thin and thinner. 

The heat glowed against their skin, cherry red and hot enough to hurt, but they both ignored it - or at least as much as they could. The heat didn't seem to touch Sephiroth, who was lost in some internal trance. Cloud could feel, and yet he didn't dare twitch a muscle to spoil that concentration. 

For nearly a minute, things were at a standstill - the chattering of Jenova’s voice grew louder, angrier, the tones darker and uglier, and it seemed as though there was no end to her magic. It tugged at the parts of Cloud that were bound irrevocably to her, clouding his thoughts, his concentration, his loyalties… he could only imagine what was happening in Sephiroth. 

“ _ Now. _ ”

Aeris’s voice was like a bell, ringing and unmistakeable. 

Cloud heard the shrill whine of building magic a second before the echoing crash - Zack’s power punched a hole straight through all three spheres with the force of a freight train. A storm of blue-white demonfire - a hundred times his usual limit break - roared over their heads, scorching the white stucco. 

In the same instant, Aeris’s power changed - every shred of that glowing, healing ball of green transmuted at once into water. Laughing, joyous, and faintly triumphant, it stormed down the path Zack’s limit had made with a waterfall’s churning roar of inevitability. Like the tide, it washed over the globe and snuffed out the snaking tongues of fire with a loud hiss of steam and the shrill scream of Jenova’s impotent fury. 

Sephiroth’s eyes snapped open, his hands dropping away from Cloud. “Clever,” he murmured, the witchlight in his eyes glimmering with the faintest hint of respect. 

Magic had to feed off something. Aeris had cut Jenova off from her own spell, smothered it from the outside with a superior element while leaving nothing left on the inside it could possibly burn through. 

Perhaps that was what she'd been waiting for all along. 

Certainly it was enough for Sephiroth, who chose that moment to call up the rolling thunder, the crashing storm, his power a low rumble of promise. He had thought of a way.

“The little mage has won by trial of combat, by battle and bond with beast,” he said in a voice pitched low, and yet carried like a shout. It was as if the world around them silenced and bent forth to hear his words. “She has blooded her blade and braved the inferno.”

\-- _ TRaitORrrRRr-- _

“She has bested the Mother,” Sephiroth continued, as light began to spin in the depths of his jewels, and the palms of his hands glittered with the sparkle of ancient sigils, “and the Pact lives again in her people. By tooth and claw.”

“Tooth and claw,” Zack echoed, his voice a dull rasp, but his face triumphant. 

“Witnessed.” Cloud finished, his voice firm with no undercurrent of magic. This was outside of him, but as Eldest he had the right to lend his voice. May it be binding - though, as he would have reason to know, the Mother was not known to follow the laws of the Planet any further than she could throw them. 

With a ripple of thunder, Sephiroth completed the last sigil. The sphere of Aeris’s magic sheared away into wisps and then into nothing. Jenova’s snarl was the rattle of old bones and insect carapaces as her essence was torn away, locked back with the rest of her in her otherworld cage. 

Zack and Aeris tumbled to the ground sopping wet to the skin. Zack hissed, whip-fast reflexes snatching Aeris right out of the air, holding her up off the ground and the glass - only to find that the two of them were floating, wrapped again in that swirling ball of wind. 

They looked at Sephiroth. He wasn’t smiling, but he had that look on his face as he held their gaze, a wry quirk of his lips of humor, a faint softness in his eyes, even as he cradled their bodies in his magic. Cloud reached out to pluck them out of the gentle whirlwind one by one. 

Zack’s smile was like a sunbeam, a quick flash of warmth that left a glow in Cloud’s soul. He made a sound like a deep, purring trill - what started as one and ended as the other - that was part teasing, and all affection. But Aeris… Aeris was like air itself, her eyes distant as though she were caught half in this world, half in another. She clutched his fingers, and for a moment he thought he saw flower petals drifting across a field. 

“What…?”

Zack made a sound that was half laughter, half worry. With gentle fingers he grasped Aeris’s other hand, chafing her skin. “I think she was trying to save me. Weren't you, doll? Taking us back to that… other place. I could almost see it, like a light at the end of the tunnel.”

“Promised Land...” Sephiroth mused, leaning in over Cloud’s hair, his fingers tilting up her chin to peer down at her with eyes just as green and twice as uncanny. “Come back now, little mage. You will not tempt me with what-could-have-beens this day, not when I have just acknowledged you as the warrior knight of your people.”

That drew a giggle, as Aeris’s lashes fluttered and her eyes sharpened on Sephiroth. “I'm not much of a knight.”

Zack laughed. “If you're pack,” he said, drawing up her hand where her fingers were still entwined in his and pressing a kiss to her knuckles, “you run with wolves and no one’ll ever know otherwise.”

She was damn cute when she blushed. "Am I?" she asked, eyes glowing and warm and so hopeful it hurt. "You’ll take me then, for real?"

Cloud didn't even need to look at Sephiroth to see the mage's wry smile. "After all that? With the Demon Bitch Queen hungry for your blood on the one side and your chances of becoming Empress Shinra on the other, I think it's in everybody's best interest to keep you on our payroll indefinitely.”

“Anyone who can get scrappy with me’s got my vote,” Zack offered. “You know, if I got one.”

“I think it’s just as well you don’t,” Cloud replied with a wry smile, “particularly while you’re still grounded, young man.”

Zack ducked his head, looking  _ almost  _ properly chastened if not for the gleam of laughter in his eyes.

“But he’s right,” he added as Aeris petted the top of Zack’s head sympathetically, and their little demon brat burrowed his face happily against her neck in the spirit of taking liberties. “I won’t lie, we’re always in the market for a good healer. And what you pulled back there… it was nothing short of spectacular.”

A tiny gleam in her eye sparkled, “So… you’re saying I’m sitting in a pretty high pay grade already, right?”

“Thinking like a merc already,” Sephiroth said with a shake of his head, “the magelet learns fast.”

“And she’s cheeky. Zack is gonna be positively insufferable from now on, I can tell.” Ignoring Zack’s chuckle, and the toothy smile, Cloud shared another look with Sephiroth, asking for one last time  _ if he was sure _ . 

“I think she’s going to be just fine,” Sephiroth said at last, echoing his own thoughts, with a faintly rueful half-smile. Then with a swift glance downward, the smile stretched further, and the mage reached over to delicately pick up a sweater (it was hard to tell whose) and held it out to Cloud. “I think we might discuss the particulars at a later time.”

\--Gods damn it, he’d forgotten he was still naked.

Certainly Aeris hadn’t. She was looking too. 

Midgarians.

“Right,” he said, tugging himself into the oversized sweater, and ignoring the blow to his dignity when he realized it hung down all the way to his thighs and the sleeves nearly a foot over his fingertips, “Zack, if the lady wants to check in with her mother, you wait until the twins come back before you take one or more of them to go with you. There’s only so far I’m willing to test Shinra’s impotency.”

That was probably the wrong choice of word. He straightened the sweater.

“So that’s… that’s it, then,” Aeris said, with a strange expression on her face, equal parts bewilderment and almost unwilling amusement at the breadth of so many new developments, “One moment the scourge of my people appears to throw me into a wall and burn the life out of me, the next I’m saluting my naked new boss and free to roam the city again. It’s so… pat. So neat.” 

Cloud’s eyebrow quirked as he surveyed the disaster of fire, glass, water, and smoke that had once been half of a perfectly functional living room.  _ Neat _ , wasn’t exactly the way he’d put it.

“It won’t stay that way, not if I know anything about Jenova  _ or  _ Shinra,”  he said at last. “You’re right though. For a first initiation, your experience has been… an interesting one.” 

It was also troubling, and Cloud knew Sephiroth’s eyes were turned studiously away so that the others wouldn’t see just how much so. They didn’t seem to think anything was amiss - Zack’s head was bent down as he whispered something into Aeris’s ear, and she had her head cocked with a look on her face like she was listening to the words he was saying, and perhaps some he weren’t. 

It would be no easy thing, housing a Cetra and the Demon Queen’s avatar so close together. Something would… something would have to be done if this was to last.

Aeris would need training, and they’d have to see just how much field work she’d be able to handle. They’d have to bring the twins up to speed. They’d have to somehow navigate the occasionally awkward intricacies of the Strife Delivery Service sleeping arrangements.

Then Zack picked up the girl by the waist with a roar of laughter and a whoop of triumph, spinning her in a freewheeling circle until she squealed and wrapped her legs around him, scrunched her face and her breathless laughter against the soft spikes of his hair. If you launched a rocket into outer space, you could see the glow of their magic’s synergy from orbit.

And Cloud thought maybe he worried just a little too much. Whatever the hell they had to do, if they could make this work, it was worth it. They could continue to hold their own against Shinra, against anything the other merc companies could throw at them. They could hold onto what work they could get, beholden to no one. They could be free, and she along with them. 

Then he caught Aeris’s eye; her head was still pillowed against Zack’s hair, but she was watching him steadily, with a keenness to her expression that made Cloud wonder once again whether or not she could really read minds. 

Whatever the hell they had to do, it looked like Aeris was going to be first in line to make it work. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a heck of a lot shorter than I wanted it to be, but I simply had no idea how to bulk up the passages that tied all these events together. That's probably what held this back the most, that and figuring out what these silly things will DO, always throwing strange wrenches and random new powers into the mix. 
> 
> I had a bunny for a Sephiroth/Aeris-oriented fic that'd explore some of the tensions lurking around the edges of this one. I think it could be cool (and damn sexy) but I like to be thorough with a story when I throw a wrench into my ships, and that might take a lot of work and probably a lot of time. Who knows, who knows. I certainly never do until it happens, and I realize I've skived off work to write 50k in a night. Here's hoping!

**Author's Note:**

> Coming up next, Cloud and Sephiroth sexin's. I've all but decided that after finishing this (writing sex always takes longer than the rest, so heaven knows why I keep writing more), that there's going to be one more tying up (perhaps literally) some of the more complicated ins and outs of the Sephiroth/Aeris dynamic. I don't know what else is likely to happen because my imagination has surprised me several times over the course of writing this (just read the original version of this story from nearly 10 years ago, Magnet) and I'm just happy to go along for the ride.
> 
> Also, Reno's reference to Sephiroth as a seidhrmadhr is a reference to the Norse use of it, as a male mage or sorceror. It was a branch of the arts that was attributed more to women though and something of a social taboo for the men, who were looked down upon as being effeminate or unmanly. Odin was once mocked for practising it by Loki. FFVII uses so many Norse references, I always like to go "well, what's one more?" :)


End file.
